The present invention relates to distributed IP systems and telecommunication systems and, more particularly, to a multi-functional telecommunications system with geographically dispersible components that interact over a distributed IP architecture.
Over the past several decades, voice mail has continued to expand and establish itself as a key element in the successful operations of most businesses. The typical voice mail system today can take on a variety of forms, including a computer card that can operate within a personal computer that is connected to a businesses telephone system, or a computer card or component that is directly integrated into the businesses telephone system, or as a service provided by a telecommunications company.
The common ingredient to each of the voice mail systems available today is that the components that make up the voice mail system must communicate with each other and thus, must be co-located. This can be a great disadvantage for companies that have geographically dispersed offices.
In today's global economy, even small business may have a need for multiple offices for serving clients, interacting with vendors, or various other reasons. The advent of the Internet, email and video conferencing helps to allow such dispersed operations appear more seamless. However, a significant problem that still exists for dispersed offices is having a common telephonic system that operates as a single, co-located system but serves the needs of the various offices. Generally, each office purchases and maintains its own telephone system without any direct interface between the telephone systems of the various offices and without any central control. This can be a costly endeavor in that duplicative hardware must be purchased and maintained at each site. In addition, the logistics of inter-office communication such as call transfers, voice mail retrieval etc. can be complex. Thus, there is a need in the art for a telecommunications system that allows seamless integration for remotely located offices.
In addition, even if a seamless integration of a telephone system is obtained, there still exists a need for personalization of the telephone systems in the various offices. For instance, if the offices are located in different time zones, it may be important to have the ability for each office to uniquely set up the system for handling incoming calls, switching the system to night or weekend mode, entering or deleting individuals from the system etc. Thus, there is a need in the art for a distributed telephone system that provides seamless integration, while at the same time allowing components of the system to be individually programmed and/or maintained at the remote offices.
The architecture of for a platform to provide video mail capabilities needs to provide several features. A few of these features or aspects include: (a) supporting various types of equipment or receiving devices, (b) processing of video messages in various formats, (c) separating or individually accessing of audio/video components of video messages and (d) handling of errors on the communication channel for the provision of video frames.
For instance, video mail capabilities should support both 3G-324M and H.323 devices. 3G interfaces typically utilize E1 spans, while H.323 interface is for IP (Ethernet) connections. Video messages that are received and/or stored in a system should store the messages in a common format that supports playback over either of these two interfaces or others. In addition, to enable the playback of the video message utilizing industry standard media players (e.g. WINDOWS Media Player), video messages should be retrievable from a web (HTTP) interface.
Video messages may enter the system encoded in various ways. At playback time, the playback encoding may be different from the encoding originally received. The system should be capable of transcoding between various formats. It would be advantageous if the system stored all video messages in a single format. Transcoding will be required both at record and at playback.
The present invention should be able to play back only the audio portion of a video message. It is advantageous to store the audio portion of a message separate from the video portion.
At playback time, errors on the communication channel may cause the receiver to request a complete video frame (I-VOP) to be sent when only a partial frame (P-VOP) was originally recorded when the message was received.
Thus, the main architectural problems to be solved are providing video telephony interfaces, and storage and retrieval of the video messages.